Relief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  If Luther thought his father might not come or might come only as a grudging pro forma gesture, he was mistaken. When the great day came, Hans Luther arrived, and did so in almost regal fashion, with no fewer than twenty guests, and all on horses too. It would not do for someone of his stature to have any of his guests riding the many miles to Erfurt on unyielding wooden carts. And if this entourage weren’t enough to impress his son and his son’s new circle, the prosperous father took the occasion to make a considerable financial gift of twenty gulden to the monastery. The whole thing might even have verged on ostentation, but the point was made. Hans Luther was himself not insensitive to the moment of what he had come to see. Whether he was sincerely reconciled to the idea that his eldest son had become a poor monk, however, is another question. Why he had come and had brought so many guests and had made an impressive contribution to the monastery all remains something of a mystery. Some have speculated that the recent deaths of two relatives close to him from the plague had caused him to fear God more than previously.6 The most recent scholarship suggests it was two of his younger sons who had died during this period—for the plague struck Mansfeld hard in 1505, the year of Luther’s entrance into the monastery—so it might well have been the horror of losing two of his boys that brought Hans Luther to some kind of repentance, or perhaps simply to a deeper appreciation of his eldest living son. In fact, it seems that during his time being out of communication with Martin, Hans received word that Martin too had died in the plague. So perhaps this journey and gift were his way of thanking God for his son’s life and of repenting of his earlier ire toward Martin for the shocking decision to abandon his father’s well-intentioned plans for him. What was in his father’s mind was not quite clear, but Martin was glad he had come.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  DeNooyer said the frameworks are an anchor that employees can refer back to, helping them prioritize and avoid frustration. “People have them hanging on their bulletin board or as a screensaver,” she added. “And when the world seems to be on fire, they can lean back and say, ‘Okay, does this new thing fit?’ If not, they probably don’t need to be working on it.” As a new step in creating roadmaps, involving the entire group in the process of developing team targets is powerful for a few key reasons. First, team members are better than bosses at knowing how much time particular tasks will take, and what impediments they may hit to getting them done; and when a manager really listens to this input it helps reduce unnecessary stress going forward. Second, by working transparently as a group, everyone can understand and align on the most critical priorities for the team as a whole. Third, research has shown that giving teams a greater sense of control over their collective goals is a boon for engagement and productivity. We’ve known this for some time. For instance, in 1939, Kurt Lewin conducted what we believe is the first study to identify if group expectations would strengthen achievement at the Harwood Pajama Factory in Virginia. Several teams of workers at the factory were given a chance to set their own goals, and the participants met for thirty minutes each week to talk about challenges they were facing and collectively discuss whether they were ready to increase productivity or keep it the same. During the weekly meetings, it became clear that workers were using different methods to accomplish the same tasks on the line, which led to improvements and standardizations in processes that enhanced productivity. At the end of each meeting, the group voted on whether to increase their daily output, to what level, and over what period of time. As a result, they eventually voted to enhance output from seventy-five units an hour to eighty-seven over a period of five days. A few weeks later, they agreed they could increase output again. Throughout the next five months, the group maintained its growth and achieved output well beyond anything seen before. Lewin believed that this democratic way of decision-making was the key to productivity growth. In fact, groups tested later—that had no democratic voting, and where a manager set the goals—did not achieve anywhere near the same productivity growth.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  It was just unbelievable.” Rainey said everyone in his life rallied to support him. Now he has the network he’s needed all along. “I can say to my wife or my team that I need a break. I’m feeling overwhelmed, anxious. And they’re like, sure, no problem.” This CEO today is very sensitive to those on his team who may need a break, such as mental health time off or when work needs to be taken off their plate. He’s on the lookout for those who may be paddling desperately under the surface. “Sometimes it’s the most confident, outgoing who are suffering on the inside. You never know,” he said. “The mental energy it takes every minute of the day is exhausting. Now, I’m freed up to focus on my family, my team. I’m just so much happier at work, more productive.” Unfortunately, like Rainey did for decades, far too many employees keep quiet and may be en route to worrying themselves into early graves. That’s not entirely an exaggeration. According to a study by Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School professors, workplace stress and anxiety may be a contributing factor in more than 120,000 deaths annually. In short, tens of billions of dollars, massive employee burnout, and the mental and physical well-being of our workforces are all at stake when considering how to mitigate anxiety. So what are organizations supposed to do about the problem? Since it’s so widespread, isn’t anxiety like this a result of large social forces, the effects of which companies can’t hope to forestall? How is an individual manager supposed to intervene against global tensions? Despite the objections, a growing collective of leaders we meet are finding success in helping alleviate anxiety in their teams. It’s about becoming advocates for employees. To do this, they have adapted their leadership styles to be focused, first and foremost, on creating healthy places to work. Albert Einstein might have been speaking of today’s best leaders when he wrote: “The measure of intelligence is the ability of change.” The ResilientWe are often invited into organizations to discuss building resilience—employees’ ability to respond to change and recover from challenges. As we begin these discussions, many leaders will attribute the problem of rising anxiety levels to such things as the rapid pace of their business transformation, the intensity of competition, and a lack of toughness in people today. Few tend to consider that the ways in which they are managing their teams may not only be contributing to needless anxiety among their employees, but also sometimes the primary drivers of it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  67 In Augsburg, Bernhard Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden, who had been threatened with excommunication in the bull Exsurge Domine, sought absolution from Eck. Conrad Peutinger, the powerful civic secretary of Augsburg, who had appeared to support Luther in 1518, was careful to rebuild his bridges: He took a leading part in negotiations at Worms, and shrewdly used the opportunities for backroom dealing that the Diet afforded to secure benefices for his underage grandson; it was clear now which side he was on. But the Catholic party had not achieved very much. Aleander might remark waspishly that by the time Luther appeared in public at Worms, people already knew he was a drunkard and a scoundrel, his “many oversteppings in looks, attitude and comportment, in word and deed” having robbed him of all respect. And although he described how Luther had gorged himself on food offered him by various princes and dignitaries before leaving, and had washed this down with a good deal of malmsey wine, this kind of gossip was hardly likely to dent Luther’s image as a man of the people. 68 The Catholics had, however, secured the support of the emperor, which they had been unable to take for granted: Aleander’s account of what transpired at the Diet betrays his relief that Charles had not been fooled by Luther. 35. This portrait of Luther faces the title page of an account of his actions at Worms, Acta et res gestae, D. Martini Lvtheri and it was printed in Strasbourg in May or June 1520. This image may well have been the one that annoyed Aleander so much. It is clearly based on Cranach’s original (see page 146), but the artist, Hans Baldung Grien, has added a halo to make Luther appear as a saint, and a dove to indicate that he is inspired by the Holy Spirit. But what should be done with Luther himself ? Some at the Diet had insisted that the monk, as a heretic, did not merit a safe conduct. On these same grounds, Jan Hus’s imperial safe conduct had been breached and he had been executed in 1415 at the Council of Constance. Fortunately for Luther, this was not the line Charles V took. The emperor kept his promise and granted Luther a safe conduct back home. 69 The simple friar who proclaimed the Word of God had become a hero. A pamphlet that appeared not long after the Diet depicted the events as a replay of Christ’s Passion: In 1521 Luther crossed the Rhine at Frankfurt to continue on to Worms. He and his disciples assembled for the evening meal where they broke bread together. Luther warned them that one of their number would betray him, and they all denied that they would.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The indulgences question was linked with the assault on scholasticism and was part of a general impatience with old ways of doing things. Humanists could see in them an attack on the established authorities, who clung to their philosophy instead of returning to the sources and reading texts anew and critically. The theses also reflected a lay devotional piety that sought true repentance and aimed at mystical union with Christ: Indulgences were anathema to this spiritual sensibility. Indeed, that questioning was probably more important than anything else. So far as Luther himself was concerned, the theses marked a profound shift in his own understanding of himself, for around the time of their posting, he changed his name. He no longer signed himself “Luder,” his father’s name, but took on the new Greek name “Eleutherius”—the freed one—which he continued to use for several months. “Luder” was a somewhat unfortunate name to inherit because in German it has associations with looseness and immorality. Even when he stopped signing himself as Eleutherius, he kept the kernel of the name and from then on called himself “Luther.” 64 How did Luther become “the freed one,” reaching his theological conviction that human beings are justified by faith alone? More ink has probably been spilled on when and where Luther’s “breakthrough” took place and exactly what it consisted of than on any other issue surrounding the Reformation. Theologians interested in Luther’s early development usually place it at the so-called tower experience, when Luther suddenly understood the nature of grace, long before the formulation of the Ninety-five Theses. Yet it is not clear that it was a single experience, although part of the process certainly happened in 1517 when he changed his name. Later on, he sometimes felt it was important to identify a “Pauline moment,” a point at which he truly understood that man could be saved through faith alone because, as an emotional transformation that changed everything, it had to be located in a single event. In 1532, he told the story of his Reformation discovery to his table companions. Describing how burdened he had been by the thought of the punishing justice of God, the idea that the righteous shall live by faith alone had struck him “like a thunderbolt,” in the monastery’s privy tower where his study was situated. As he put it, “This art the Holy Spirit gave me on the cloaca.” It was clear that Luther wanted his audience to be struck by the contrast between the importance of the revelation and the lowly place where it occurred.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In Europe, the churches are emptying; atheism is no longer the painfully acquired ideology of a few intellectual pioneers but a prevailing mood. In the past it was always produced by a particular idea of God, but now it seems to have lost its inbuilt relationship to theism and become an automatic response to the experience of living in a secularized society. Like the crowd of amused people surrounding Nietzsche’s madman, many are unmoved by the prospect of life without God. Others find his absence a positive relief. Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to be rid of the God who terrorized our childhood. It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules. We have a new intellectual freedom and can boldly follow up our own ideas without pussyfooting around difficult articles of faith, feeling all the while a sinking loss of integrity. We imagine that the hideous deity we have experienced is the authentic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims and do not always realize that it is merely an unfortunate aberration. There is also desolation. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of the God-shaped hole in the human consciousness, where God had always been. Nevertheless, he insisted that even if God existed, it was still necessary to reject him, since the idea of God negates our freedom. Traditional religion tells us that we must conform to God’s idea of humanity to become fully human. Instead, we must see human beings as liberty incarnate. Sartre’s atheism was not a consoling creed, but other existentialists saw the absence of God as a positive liberation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) argued that instead of increasing our sense of wonder, God actually negates it. Because God represents absolute perfection, there is nothing left for us to do or achieve. Albert Camus (1913–60) preached a heroic atheism. People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind. As always, the atheists have a point. God had indeed been used in the past to stunt creativity; if he is made a blanket answer to every possible problem and contingency, he can indeed stifle our sense of wonder or achievement. A passionate and committed atheism can be more religious than a weary or inadequate theism. During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  let go, as they say. Or call it the moment my innately serotonin-challenged brain reached level X. The change happens before my eyes, the muted colors of the room brightening from gray to a cool azure. Now when I begin obsessively to gnaw on my fears, I try to wrestle them loose from myself (who are these two halves?) the way you’d take a slipper from a Doberman. It’s in my higher power’s hands, I tell myself. They say More will be revealed, not More will be figured out. I feel well enough one afternoon to ring Walt and give him the lowdown. (His wife was ill with cancer at the time, so the call was brief.) You’re in the best place, he says. I wish I’d known you were having such a hard time. That’s the nature of it, though, I say—isolation. But you’re feeling better? You need me to fly out there and bring you a hot-fudge malted? Hold that thought, I say. That afternoon, when Warren and Dev show up, I feel a rush of delight just seeing them. Warren opens the stairwell door with one hand so Dev can slide past him, and the instant stays haloed in gold, for it’s my first conscious memory of something solidly good. Though their afternoon visit is always the day’s highlight, it routinely sends a volcano of guilt up my middle, since Dev always steps onto the ward with such hesitance, a posture almost soldierly in its wary vigilance. (Even now, from a distance of eighteen years, he remembers how scary the place was.) Dev was born into a bold certainty of feeling. About nearly everything, he held convictions. As a newborn, he had the appetite of a jackal. As a toddler, once faced with a tea service at my in-laws’, he’d stuck his fist in the sugar bowl and upended it, sugar spraying all over as Mrs. Whitbread hissed that no other child in that house had ever interfered with a tea. While other toddlers had winced at new food, he had a taste for sashimi, for steak tartare with raw onion and egg yolk. He approached stray dogs with his arms open, ran full speed into waves. Yet he was all sensibility. (In a few years, I’d see Dev stand once for a long time before two Cubist paintings—one Braque and one Picasso— announcing, I know I’m supposed to like the Picasso more, but this one’s stronger. And so it had been.) He was sturdily resolute in all his tastes. That day in the hospital, Dev comes in dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt, looking like a miniature Miami dope dealer, and wary that way, as if expecting to find machine guns in the hands of rival gang members as he slides under Warren’s arm. But, instead of my usual stab of concern or guilt, I see this as a single instant in his life amid a zillion other instants with attendant feelings—love, curiosity, desire.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  horn-rims, saying, Leave all that stuff here with me. God wants you to put this stuff down now. Go wear the world like a loose garment. And be of good cheer. If you let God in, He’ll take this shame from you. Descending the subway stairs, I no longer ooze the sweaty, reptilian stench I walked in with, but I can’t say I feel like I’ve wholly shed my past. That night, though, I sleep like somebody clocked with a sledgehammer. The next morning in the bathroom mirror, there’s more shine in my eyes. Throughout the day, when my head lurches for the old miseries to start gnawing on, I have a touchstone phrase—That’s done—I blurt internally as often as need be. The mind, whirring for decades at thousands of rpm’s per second, keeps trying to fill in new freefalls of quiet. For the first time in my life, I go to sleep every night soundly, without medication, sometimes nine hours a pop. Don’t get me wrong. The irritation that once drove me like a cato’-nine-tails can start flailing in an instant. But now the car door I slam or the snipe I let fly at Warren trails an apology. I blurt out sorry nonstop, since I never again want to nurse such bitterness as I’d stored up before. Once, I’m laden with parcels and carrying Dev up slick stairs on my hip after he’s hurt his ankle, and he calls me poopy head so many times that I’m ready to fling him down and swear. But a quick prayer—Please let me be a loving mom—leads me to bust out laughing instead. When a guy honks and cuts me off and shrieks at me, calling me the c-word, my hand does not automatically flip him the bird—a small change, maybe, but for me profound. That spring-loaded trigger has eased off. The guy’s comment just flows past as if I’ve been lacquered over. Every so often I find myself praying for citizens like him, though in the past I might have petitioned for a machine gun. One morning at my desk, an essay I’ve had an idea about starts to unreel itself like a satin ribbon. Six hours later, I look up and realize I’ve been writing with ease. Some days, premenstrual self-loathing can transform me into a ring-tailed, horn-honking, door-slamming bitch. But those incidents now strike me as 100 percent my problem, regardless of provocation. And they bring me to my knees, for it’s on their back end that I sometimes fantasize about a slender glass of innocent champagne with some berry-colored crème de cassis making a little sunset in the flute’s bottom. Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past. But the spiritual lens— even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day’s actions—is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Augustine’s conversion seems like a psychological abreaction, after which the convert falls exhausted into the arms of God, all passion spent. As Augustine lay weeping on the ground, he suddenly heard a child’s voice in a nearby house chanting the phrase “Tolle, lege: pick up and read, pick up and read!” Taking this as an oracle, Augustine leapt to his feet, rushed back to the astonished and long-suffering Alypius and snatched up his New Testament. He opened it at St. Paul’s words to the Romans: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.” The long struggle was over: “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine recalled. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” 31 God could also be a source of joy, however: not long after his conversion, Augustine experienced an ecstasy one night with his mother, Monica, at Ostia on the River Tiber. We shall discuss this in more detail in Chapter 7. As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in the mind, and in Book X of the Confessions, he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria, memory. This was something far more complex than the faculty of recollection and is closer to what psychologists would call the unconscious. For Augustine, memory represented the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike. Its complexity and diversity filled him with astonishment. It was an “awe- inspiring mystery,” an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves. 32 It was through this teeming inner world that Augustine descended to find his God, who was paradoxically both within and above him. It was no good simply searching for proof of God in the external world. He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind: Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.

• From A History of God (1993)

  From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it “in the sight of my heart” (Psalm 18:15). That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. To pour it all out with the accompanying groans, I got up from beside Alypius (solitude seemed to me more appropriate for the business of weeping).… I threw myself down somehow under a certain fig tree and let my tears flow freely. Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to you (Psalm 50:19), and—though not in these words, yet in this sense—I repeatedly said to you, “How long, O Lord, how long will you be angry to the uttermost?” (Psalm 6:4)30 God has not always come easily to us in the West. Augustine’s conversion seems like a psychological abreaction, after which the convert falls exhausted into the arms of God, all passion spent. As Augustine lay weeping on the ground, he suddenly heard a child’s voice in a nearby house chanting the phrase “Tolle, lege: pick up and read, pick up and read!” Taking this as an oracle, Augustine leapt to his feet, rushed back to the astonished and long-suffering Alypius and snatched up his New Testament. He opened it at St. Paul’s words to the Romans: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.” The long struggle was over: “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine recalled. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”31 God could also be a source of joy, however: not long after his conversion, Augustine experienced an ecstasy one night with his mother, Monica, at Ostia on the River Tiber. We shall discuss this in more detail in Chapter 7. As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in the mind, and in Book X of the Confessions, he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria, memory. This was something far more complex than the faculty of recollection and is closer to what psychologists would call the unconscious. For Augustine, memory represented the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike. Its complexity and diversity filled him with astonishment. It was an “awe-inspiring mystery,” an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves.32 It was through this teeming inner world that Augustine descended to find his God, who was paradoxically both within and above him. It was no good simply searching for proof of God in the external world. He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind:

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But I know that day how swiftly such moments pass, how cunning, baffling, and powerful my own logic can be. My head is grinding inside like a peppermill, and by dawn, a hangover has landed a cold hatchet in the back of my skull. After horking up my stomach contents in Radcliffe Yard, I drive to the home of poet Thomas Lux and his wife. On sultry summer days, Dev played with their toddler daughter while Tom and his wife barbecued for a ragtag gaggle of writers. Since his wife toils as tirelessly as Warren, Tom and I occasionally meet in a park or meander our strollers through a mall crawl. In grad school, before he’d been domesticated, Tom outdrank every two-fisted sot who came through. His escapades were passed around with the cheap wine. A die-hard Red Sox fan, he’d once broken his toe kicking a hole in the wall after a grisly loss to Cincinnati. A girlfriend who caught him cheating dumped his clothes out the window onto a New York street. Then in a Cambridge bookstore years later, he tipped up his sunglasses to show his clear eyes while announcing to me he’d stopped drinking. That morning after my weepy crash, I stand snot-nosed before Tom and his wife in their breakfast nook, waiting for both of them to deliver some healing whap in the head. Great, Tom says instead. You’ll get sober, and your poems will get better, and your kid will grow up with a happy mother.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  On a steaming August day, I attended my first scholars’ sherry hour wearing a plastic wrist bracelet I tried to hide under the sleeve of my gabardine jacket. Shortly after that, Warren ran into a friend of ours who was a shrink, and I called to ask if he could get me the fuck out of the bin, and he waved a wand that made Alice in Wonderland disappear like the ghost she was. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Then I was stepping through the door of my own house. Then my son’s smooth arms were around my neck.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  First of all, in the wake of the Leipzig Debate, Luther's attitude to his monastic vocation began to alter. From his early years as a monk, he had been obliged to attend services and perform the ‘hours’, the repetition of prayers which took a prominent place in a monk’s daily routine and consumed much of his time.’ Even after the Augsburg discussions, when Staupitz had released Luther from his vows, he still found it hard to give up this duty, as if it were a burden he could not put down. At some point in 1520, however, he stopped altogether. He recalled in 1531, ‘Our Lord God pulled me by force away from the canonical hours in 1520, when I was already writing a great deal, and I often saved up my hours for a whole week, and then on Saturday | would do them one after another so that I neither ate nor drank anything for the whole day, and I was so weakened that I couldn't sleep, so that I had to be given Dr Esch’s sleeping draught, the effects of which I still feel in my head.” In the end, a ‘whole quarter-year’ of hours had mounted up: “This was too much for me, and I dropped it altogether.’ The resulting liberation — and the amount of time it freed up — may have played a great part in the burst of creativity he experienced in 1520: now he could devote himself to writing and thinking without interruption or guilt. All this was the more intense as, the more radical his positions became, the more likely was a summons to Rome and a trial for heresy. As all those around him knew, such a trial would end with him being burned. With every theological departure he became bolder, because there was less and less to lose — and this made him think through all the logical consequences of the theological positions he had adopted. On 24 June 1520 the bull condemning Luther’s doctrine was published, and he was given sixty days from the date he received it to recant or be banned as a ‘notorious heretic’. The language is chilling and it is crammed with animal and hunting metaphors — the ‘foxes have arisen, trying to destroy the vineyards’, a wild pig is trying to attack Peter, the sheep need protecting — which may owe something to the fact that Leo approved the bull on 2 May 1520 when he was watching a sow hunt at his castle in Magliana, south-west of Rome.‘ THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN 147 Luther had rejected the compromise attempts of Cajetan and of the papal envoy Karl von Miltitz, so there was no going back in his fight with the Curia.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There is much to support this view. In Europe, the churches are emptying; atheism is no longer the painfully acquired ideology of a few intellectual pioneers but a prevailing mood. In the past it was always produced by a particular idea of God, but now it seems to have lost its inbuilt relationship to theism and become an automatic response to the experience of living in a secularized society. Like the crowd of amused people surrounding Nietzsche’s madman, many are unmoved by the prospect of life without God. Others find his absence a positive relief. Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to be rid of the God who terrorized our childhood. It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules. We have a new intellectual freedom and can boldly follow up our own ideas without pussyfooting around difficult articles of faith, feeling all the while a sinking loss of integrity. We imagine that the hideous deity we have experienced is the authentic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims and do not always realize that it is merely an unfortunate aberration. There is also desolation. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of the God-shaped hole in the human consciousness, where God had always been. Nevertheless, he insisted that even if God existed, it was still necessary to reject him, since the idea of God negates our freedom. Traditional religion tells us that we must conform to God’s idea of humanity to become fully human. Instead, we must see human beings as liberty incarnate. Sartre’s atheism was not a consoling creed, but other existentialists saw the absence of God as a positive liberation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) argued that instead of increasing our sense of wonder, God actually negates it. Because God represents absolute perfection, there is nothing left for us to do or achieve. Albert Camus (1913–60) preached a heroic atheism. People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind. As always, the atheists have a point. God had indeed been used in the past to stunt creativity; if he is made a blanket answer to every possible problem and contingency, he can indeed stifle our sense of wonder or achievement. A passionate and committed atheism can be more religious than a weary or inadequate theism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  During his years as an unhappy monk he had felt burdened in his conscience, which led him to confess with extreme frequency. This was the unhappiness from which Staupitz had freed him, by showing him that God accepts us not because of our good works, but as sinners. Staupitz’s own writings showed a profound awareness of the danger of imposing on an individual’s conscience: he advised that it should only be burdened if one had committed a mortal sin. But if, he says, you find yourself burdened over sins that are not infringements of the Commandments, and if you can perceive that they are not, then you should simply jettison your ‘errant’ conscience; or if that is not possible, you should turn to your confessor so as to attain relief — advice that must have been honed in dealing with oversensitive consciences like Luther’s.* But even though Staupitz was such an effective minister to Luther’s conscience, his understanding of the word differed from Luther’s. Whereas for Staupitz a conscience could be mistaken, and could be troubled with matters that were unim- portant, for Luther it was the seat of certainty and could never be wrong. When Luther said his conscience was ‘captive to the Word of God’ he meant that it could not be moved or altered; he ‘knew’ with his whole being — mind and emotion — what God’s Word was, and could not deny it. Nothing Luther had written or done previously had such an effect as his dramatic defiance of the emperor and the entire assembled estates THE DIET OF WORMS 185 of the Reich. As Spalatin recalled, Luther returned to his quarters comforted and happy in the Lord, saying that ‘if he had a thousand heads, he would rather they were all chopped off than that he should recant’. As he passed through the crowds he noticed the humanist Conrad Peutinger from Augsburg. ‘Dr Peutinger, are you here too?’ he said, and enquired after his family. Peutinger was evidently aston- ished by Luther’s cheerful calm in such a situation. Back in his quar- ters, Friedrich the Wise told Spalatin: “The father, Dr Martinus, spoke well . . . But he is too bold for me.” Even for those who were not interested in the intricacies of his theology, Luther's resistance at Worms was inspiring because it showed that it was possible for a simple monk to argue with the greatest powers of the day. By refusing to debate with him openly, the Catholic side had handed him a huge moral and intellectual victory, a fact which Luther was not slow to underline.” It was a deeply shocking lesson for a deferential society. It truly seemed as if the Word would sweep all before it, overturning the old order.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It perhaps explains why he was able to arrive at such a contradictory position in relation to freedom and authority. Luther managed to hold in tension both a conviction of the freedom of the Christian—and, correspondingly, of the ephemeral nature of externals, ceremonies and rules—and a belief that humans are not free to act at all. Every human action is tainted with sin, and, as he would later argue in his battle with Erasmus, human beings’ wills are in bondage. We are both free and not free. — B Y October, as the days grew shorter, and as it became clear that Luther would not be returning to Wittenberg anytime soon, he determined on a new project: translating the New Testament into German. This soon absorbed all his energies and from this point on, he did not appear to suffer from his earlier insecurities or boredom; even his constipation had apparently passed, perhaps because of the resolution he had achieved in his relationship with his father. In under eleven weeks, he translated the entire New Testament from the original Greek, not from the Vulgate, the Latin translation that had dominated the Church hitherto. It was a work of genius. Luther’s New Testament reshaped the German language itself, as Luther’s German became dominant, unifying what had been a wide range of local dialects. He was not the first to translate the Bible into German—there were many fifteenth-century German Bibles and other sixteenth-century reformers and traditionalists would also produce their own—but what sets Luther’s translation apart is his sense of the music of language. His style is direct and unadorned, using alliteration and the rhythms of everyday speech. He writes in a populist German, not in Latinate prose. This makes his translation very unlike, for instance, the English King James version, which is deliberately literary in style. Luther’s version is earthier, and his sentences shorter. This is a Bible designed to be read aloud and to be heard by ordinary people. It was not without its tendentious features. Luther built his own theological understandings into his translation, rendering Romans 1:17, for example, as “Since therein is revealed the justice which is valid before God, which comes from faith in faith, as it is written, The just person will live of his faith”—a translation that elaborates on the process of justification before God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  “I would not wish to be given free will”: To modern ears this is a remarkable statement. It is a rejection of everything we associate with the importance of the individual, the striving for human perfection, the role of human agency. Luther wanted none of it. His newfound relationship with God required there be no free will, because “I am certain and safe, because he is trustworthy and will not lie to me, and also because he is so powerful and great that no devils, no adversities could break him or snatch me from him.”46 Luther’s psychological insight was acute. If Christians had even a small remnant of free will, they would be plunged into radical uncertainty about salvation because it would not be clear how much this remnant contributed to it. Luther had experienced this despondency, trying vainly to please God through works and unable to love him. The personal tone places these intellectual struggles within the context of his early married life. He exulted to Katharina when Justus Jonas, a former acolyte of Erasmus, changed his view about the famous scholar after reading his reply to Luther. He told Jonas that when he read his wife parts of his letter, she had exclaimed, “Look what a toad the man [Erasmus] has become!”47 He later liked to weave Katharina into his reminiscences of the battle with the famous humanist, even suggesting that it had been she who had persuaded him to write against Erasmus.48 Luther’s forthright tone has repelled many since,49 but aggressive rhetoric was part and parcel of academic debate. Erasmus’s scholarly tone of ironic detachment was a provocation to Luther, whose most profound convictions were at stake here. As he later recalled, the Anfechtungen dissipated during the first years of marriage. To what might have been his surprise, Luther now experienced physical pleasure and yet also felt secure in his relationship with God; this personal revelation shines through in his absolute conviction that the human will is always inclined to evil and enslaved to Satan. He had known intellectually that Augustine was right, but now he experienced in his own body that accepting the radical Augustinian denial of the freedom of the will and the utter corruption of all human action was essential for a right relationship with God. Luther would later class his attack on Erasmus as among his very best works, and although the tract does not break new ground, it is a passionate treatise that works through the implications of his theological position with great emotional depth. Luther did not reject good works: They were vital to Christian life. But they were actions that flowed from being saved. And they could not earn salvation: That was a free gift of God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WB 7, 3088, 7 Oct. 1536, 556:3. By 1546, the authorities were having to forbid students to throw rockets and use gunpowder; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reg O 468. In 1545 the council was reporting on its ordinance against dancing and night drinking; Staatsarchiv Weimar, EGA (Witt), fo. 529. One Georg Meyssner and other citizens spoke ‘vnnutzen verdriesslichen bosen worten’ (useless, offensive evil words) and blasphemed in Luther's house: Meyssner was imprisoned for eight days and banished for six months; StadtA Witt, 114 [Bc 102], fo. 240. Mundt, Lemnius und Luther, Il, 143. WB 10, 3846, 9 Feb. 1543. He was troubled by headaches, ‘so that I can neither read nor write anything, especially sober [jejuno], 259:4; 3903, 18 Aug. 1543, he was writing after dinner, ‘for I can’t read books without danger sober [ieiunus]’, 371:38. He may have meant ‘without having eaten anything’, but drink also went with meals. WB 10, 3905, 26 Aug. 1543, 373; and see Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, 99-100. WB 10, 3983, c.17 April 1544, 554:2-5. The disputes with Agricola and Lemnius were not the only ones in which Luther’s friendship with Melanchthon was put under strain. In 1536, Conrad Cordatus had become involved in arguments first with Cruciger and then with Melanchthon over the role of works in salva- tion. Luther emphatically took Melanchthon’s part, though his own view was closer to that of Cordatus. Luther was soon recommending him for a position at Eisleben, safely further away from Wittenberg than Niemegk where he currently was; WB 8, 3153, 21 May 1537. WB 8, 3136, 3137, 3138, 3139; Vorgeschichte, 46-8 for a description of this very severe attack of stone: Luther was unable to pass water for ten or eleven days and experienced a state of euphoria before becoming deathly tired. He wrote to his wife that ‘God has performed miracles on me this night’ and that his recovery was thanks to the prayers of others; WB 8, 3140, 27 Feb. 1537, 51:20—-2. However, the attacks returned and he remained very ill, making his confession to Bugenhagen and expecting to die. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. NOTES TO PAGE 374-379 529 WB 9, 3509, 2 July 1540; Brecht, Luther, III, 209-10; WT 5, 5407 and 5565: three people had been brought back to life through prayer: Katharina von Bora, Luther himself at Schmalkalden, and Melanchthon at Weimar. Myconius also claimed to have been saved from death by Luther’s prayer; WB 9, 3566, 9 Jan. 1541. WB Io, 4028, 9 Sept. 1544, and Beilage.

• From Satyricon (1)

  The woman poured out this rhapsody in a loud excited voice, the battle-line wavered for an instant, then all hands were recalled to peace and terminated the war. Eumolpus, our commander, took advantage of the psychological moment of their repentance and, after administering a stinging rebuke to Lycas, signed a treaty of peace which was drawn up as follows: “It is hereby solemnly agreed on your part, Tryphaena, that you do forego complaint of any wrong done you by Giton; that you do not bring up anything that has taken place prior to this date, that you do not seek to revenge anything that has taken place prior to this date, that you do not take steps to follow it up in any other manner whatsoever; that you do not command the boy to perform anything to him repugnant; that you do neither embrace nor kiss the said Giton; that you do not enfold said Giton in the sexual embrace, except under immediate forfeiture of one hundred denarii. Item, it is hereby agreed on your part, Lycas, that you do refrain from annoying Encolpius with abusive word or reproachful look; that you do not seek to ascertain where he sleep at night; or, if you do so seek, that you forfeit two hundred denarii immediately for each and every such offense.” The treaty was signed upon these terms, and we laid down our arms. It seemed well to wipe out the past with kisses, after we had taken oath, for fear any vestige of rancor should persist in our minds. Factious hatreds died out amidst universal good-fellowship, and a banquet, served on the field of battle, crowned our reconciliation with joviality. The whole ship resounded with song and, as a sudden calm had caused her to lose headway, one tried to harpoon the leaping fish, another hauled in the struggling catch on baited hooks. Then some sea-birds alighted upon the yard-arms and a skillful fowler touched them with his jointed rods: they were brought down to our hands, stuck fast to the limed segments. The breeze caught up the down, but the wing and tail feathers twisted spirally as they fell into the sea-foam. Lycas was already beginning to be on good terms with me, and Tryphaena had just sprinkled Giton with the last drops in her cup, when Eumolpus, who was himself almost drunk, was seized with the notion of satirizing bald pates and branded rascals, but when he had exhausted his chilly wit, he returned at last to his poetry and recited this little elegy upon hair:

• From Shunned (2018)

  I’d spent my life a bit afraid of the world and how its influences might lead me astray, but that distrust or fear no longer gripped me. The appeal of a divorce was as much about curiosity and participation as it was about securing the mental and emotional space to sort through religious doubts. Instead of condemning the world with my doorstep sermons, perhaps I could open up to its offerings and find an expanded version of truth I could live with. A smile came across my face as I made the final turn toward the US Bank Tower. My car exterior was ravaged, but the stereo worked fine. It still held the CD Ross had apparently been playing the night before. As if by magic, Gloria Estefan serenaded me: Get on your feet Stand up and take some action As I veered into the parking garage, I started singing along. In the days that followed, this melody became my personal anthem. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] Two weeks later, I sat Ross down in the living room and informed him of my plans. After months of fretting and deliberation, I had turned a corner and set my course toward freedom. My first step was to retain a divorce attorney. Next, I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment. I scheduled the movers and planned to leave in just two weeks more. There was no turning back. “My attorney suggested we take a shot at dividing up our assets and liabilities together,” I said. I felt worldly and brash, hearing myself say “my attorney” out loud for the first time and enjoying the new feeling of power it brought me. Ross just looked at me, blinked, then stood up, walked down the hall to his office, and returned with a legal pad. “Okay,” he said, sitting back down on the couch, removing the top from the pen. “What do you want to keep? Or, should I say, what do you want to take?” Aside from the verbal jab, he showed no emotion. I sat still for several moments, marveling at his composure. Inside I felt buoyant and carefree, relieved to have unveiled my stealthy plans. It reminded me of those scenes from National Geographic where a once captive and sedated zebra is released back into the wild, open plains. You watch a few long seconds while it stumbles, takes a breath, gets its bearings, and runs for its life. Then you hope for the best. “I’d like to keep the stereo,” he said. “And I’m not giving up this house.” The house represented my past, the place where I had endured the most distressing period of my life to date. I saw only weeds in the backyard, the list of projects we’d not yet gotten around to. Good riddance , I thought. Walking away from it was easy, like taking off a coat that’s grown tight around the shoulders. It didn’t take long to sort things out.